Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1
The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.
So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.
So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.
Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.
And the probe is working again.
From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.
The Moon
The most ridiculously detailed" image of Earth’s lunar neighbor was a two-year project captured by two astrophotographers.
The 174-megapixel image, which shows the moon’s colors, craters and glowing aura in stunning detail, was first revealed on Reddit on Saturday. Through Reddit and Instagram, Andrew McCarthy, known for his breathtaking astrophotography skills, teamed up with planetary scientist and fellow photographer Connor Matherne, who has been acclaimed for his striking and vibrant photos of galaxies and nebulae.
The two previously worked together to create an incredible glowing and detailed image of the moon.
NASA Hubble Space Telescope - The ‘Swan Nebula’
Cosmic Cliffs in Carina © JWST
[...] while compartmentalization and replication are important, they are aspects of what life is and does, but they do not address the why of life. The why of life is metabolism. By completing the circuit of life, biology harnesses energy from its environment. Technically speaking, this means that biology actually helps the universe cool faster; it increases the entropy of the universe. This is why the universe needs life.
Alien Oceans by Kevin Peter Hand
the new composite james webb image is so beautiful ive been staring at it for 10 minutes straight
featuring jupiters rings, europa (along with a bunch of other moons), the northern and southern auroras, and the great red spot
The red planet. Presidential design awards 2000.
Internet Archive
okay so. does anybody remember this creepy image? and yes, it's real, by the way.
this is barnard 68, a dark nebula that does not allow light to pass through. it's quite close to us too, and so dense that the stars behind it can't be observed from earth. it's just a molecular cloud, though! looks like a tear in the fabric of existence itself, but it's just a very big dark blob of gas floating in space. barnard 68 is often confused with the boötes void, which is also referred to as "the great nothing".
what's that, you say? oh, well... it's a region in space about 330 million light years wide. this is about 0.27% of the width of the entire observable universe. an area this large is expected to have around 2000 galaxies, but this one only has 60. everything else is just... dead, empty space.
okay, what if i told you that we actually are within a void ourselves? it's called the kbc void. another name is uhh.. local hole. anyways. it's theoretically the largest void we know of, about 2 billion light years across. it's extremely speculative, but it might account for the hubble tension; that is, shit seems to be flying away from us faster than it should be.
some people claim other things cause the discrepancy in our observations of the hubble constant, some debate whether it's consistent with our current cosmological model at all. it isn't completely accepted by the astrophysics community, but it's not a preposterous claim to make either. i personally think it's cool.
maybe shit does fly away faster from us because we live in a local hole. the rest of the universe is an intergalactic party, and we're not invited.
The star hit the news back in late 2019 when it suddenly dimmed in an event known as the great dimming, and since there's been a lot of papers and theories to what really happened.
At the time, there was talk of supernova from a minority, while most astronomers reserved judgement on this, which turned out to be the right call, although even they had to admit bafflement at why this star suddenly become so dim.
Since, then the prevailing and mostly accepted theory is that the star ejected a huge amount of material which included carbon and thus concealed parts of the star, causing the dimming.
A new paper from Department of Physics and Astronomy at Louisiana State University has looked at another idea, that at some point in the recent past the star had consumed a binary partner.
While the study can only make suggestions at this point, some of the observed facts about Betelgeuse certainly fit the bill. The star spins very quickly for an old supersized red giant, even faster than our own sun, and the team believe a past consumption may have transferred energy to the star, accounting for this spin rate.
The next thing was that the super giant star didn't just dim, it rebounded and actually brightened considerably too. These events of material coming to the surface and briefly causing a brightening effect are predicted through models of this occurrence.
The star is not likely to go supernova anytime soon, but I would put bets on the likelihood of the star surprising us once again in the coming decades.
★•Astronomy, Physics, and Aerospace•★ Original and Reblogged Content curated by a NASA Solar System Ambassador
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